Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Some hints for new writers like myself

I had mentioned in my last post, how much I enjoyed attending the Philadelphia Writer's conference. The instructors were amazing and gave some great advice. One of the instructors, K. Simmons, gave the workshop on Novel plotting. Here are some suggestions that helped me and hopefully will help you.
1. Give the reader a character, they will enjoy, even if they don't like that character.
2. Take the character on a journey.
3. Give the character something they want.

K. Simmons gave us a guide to help with our novels. She called it "Sailing the 7 C's of Story Plot"
1.Combustion-creating a premise of interesting characters, and high stakes at the beginning will create a natural flowering of your story.
2.Coordination--getting the action, voice, and premise to go together.
3.Conflict--creating conflicts between characters to fuel the plot.
4.Characters--make your characters believable. Character has to grab the reader's attention from the beginning.
5.Conclusion--wrapping up the plot in a satisfying way.
6.Complettion--Too many plot points? Know when the plot is done.
7.Commitment--Where is the story coming from and are you being true to the story.

Does your story have tension? check conflict and combustion.
Premise:
1. Where are we?
2. Who is the lead character?
3. Who tells the story best?
4. What do they want?
5. What needs to be said first?
6. Why should we care?
7..Where are we going?

1 comment:

You might want to take a look at Philcon - http://www.philcon.org. It's in November and they have a lot of panels on writing. Not workshops per se, but lots of opportunity to talk to fellow writers and get good practical advice.